[1] A figurative artist with an eye for abstract form, he won critical acclaim for striking compositions that transform an unusual array of subjects, including tennis players, domestic interiors, freeways, road signs, bathtubs and the Goodyear Blimp.
In the exhibition catalogue, curator Susan M. Anderson wrote: "Kuntz's work of the late 1950s and early 1960s quintessentially embodied the experimentation, fragmentation, and paradox in American culture of the time.
His widow took their two young sons to California, moving from San Francisco to Riverside to Coronado and, finally, to Lomaland, home of the Theosophical Society's community of artists, writers and philosophers.
As his reputation grew, Kuntz joined the stable of artists represented by Felix Landau, a leading Los Angeles art dealer who maintained a prestigious gallery on La Cienega Boulevard.
Though devoid of people and cars, the distinctive images portray a stark, man-made environment designed to transport Southern California's growing population at high speeds.
In the last decade of his life, when he painted a series of brooding images of figures in and around bathtubs and made a group of related bronze sculptures, it was clear that Kuntz was not a Pop artist.
Following his own muse, he also painted tranquil studies of a young woman seated in front of a window, fanciful images of the Goodyear Blimp tethered on a runway or landing on the Moon, and scenes of beaches and tennis courts.
In 1962 Life magazine did a special issue on the state of California; it focused on five artists: Stanton Macdonald-Wright, John McLaughlin, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, and Roger Kuntz.
[3] In a Los Angeles Times review of a 2012 exhibition of the "Freeway", "Sign" and "Blimp" series, at Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood, critic David Pagel wrote that Kuntz's paintings "conjure vast landscapes beyond their edges: both the endless sprawl of L.A.'s freeways and the unfathomable vastness of our interior worlds, which are filled with their own twists and turns, dead ends and exits, intersections and underpasses.